Sad news for video game artists (and lovers of rad art in general) today, as online industry (and community) site CGHub has officially announced its closure.

In a short statement on its company Facebook page Shakuro, the operators of the site, say:

No more CGHUB.

Sad day. Project CGHUB is officially closed.

The reason behind this extremely tough decision is personal and will remain private. It's absolutely not connected with business or any kind of technical difficulties.

On behalf of development team I would like to apologize to CGHUB users and fans for abrupt project closure and delay with its announcement.

If you have any kind of questions please send them to cghub@shakuro.com . Can't promise replies to everyone though.

CGHUB wasn't ideal, but we loved it SO MUCH! :*(

Team Shakuro

Well, that's...strange.

If you've never heard of it, CGHub was an online resource where artists could share their work and mingle with their peers, voting on and critiquing others' pieces as well as creating their own portfolios. It was popular beyond those posting to the site, though, as many liked to simply visit the page and check out the latest works being uploaded by both professional and amateur artists.

If you have heard of it, you'll know it's demise is a real bummer. CGHub had emerged over the past two years to become almost the "standard" in digital art sites, especially when it came to video game artists (the majority of artists featured on our own Fine Art had galleries there), to the point where some artists' only online presence was a CGHub page.

While pros will already have their alternatives ready, if you were someone who just liked to visit and check out the pretty pictures there are plenty of alternatives out there, from ConceptArt to Polycount, who I'm sure will be getting more popular in the coming weeks following CGHub's demise.

We've contacted the site to ask about the fate of artist's work posted on CGHub, and will update when we hear back.